Annual
by Ill Ame
Summary: Once Mello got into Matt's bones, he lingered, like frost left on the ground in the middle of July.


WARNING: Spoilers up to 99.

Disclaimer: I claim no ownership of Death Note or its characters.

Notes: Excuse any crappiness - I completely forgot about Matt's birthday until late last night but I really wanted to write something for it, so this is unbetaed, a bit rushed, and, obviously, a day late.

**Annual**

February painted skies grey, and when Matt gazed out the window, the trees' naked branches looked like stark, whipping ink strokes in the clouds. Matt had spent so many weeks gazing out windows, waiting for his fifteenth birthday, that by the time January froze itself out he was too fixed in the habit to stop.

Few people talked to Matt these days – his replies were usually either snappish or listless – but those who knew what occasion fell on the first of the month found some way to mark it. Lucas tugged lightly on Matt's hair and flashed him a quiet smile as he passed in the dining hall. A scrap of sketch paper fluttered from Linda's notebook and into Matt's lap during class, almost an accident, and Cassie handed out kisses like party favors. Matt received the first, straight to the lips, but she didn't stop there. She moved among the other children, showering enthusiastic pecks against cheeks, noses and adolescent wrists.

"For Matt's birthday," she chirped after every one. "For Matt's birthday," as she swept down on the top of Near's head.

When evening fell, Near took a break from his research to fold a sheet of statistics into a blooming flower, figures facing inward and twisting down its stem. He placed his gift outside the closed door of Matt's dorm on his way to bed, where it rested undiscovered until dawn.

A day past fifteen, Matt left his room with a bag over one shoulder, a little dizzy after staying up all night, a little scared after realizing how few things he actually owned, eyes dry and heart thumping. He'd already thought this through a thousand times, he'd resolved not to stop for anything, so he wondered what it meant when a paper flower tripped him up two feet out the door.

Matt turned it over in his hands on the bus to Heathrow, examining crisp, neat folds and wondering how it had been put together. He tried to create one of his own, with pupils and irises circling the stem rather than numbers, but there was no way to determine just how to make it unless he pulled apart the original. Matt wasn't sure he'd be able to put it back together, if he did. Instead, he smoothed over his messy creases and spent the rest of the ride staring at a pair of dark, expressive eyes. There was no mistaking them, even without the hint of blond fringe that Linda had penciled in above.

Their owner would not fall into his lap so easily.

---

As the months passed, Mello's departure began to lose its bite. Feelings of bitterness shifted from a state of being to a mere aftertaste and, eventually, a shadow that Matt rarely noticed and usually didn't recognize.

Nineteen saw him settling into New York City, about to be fired from his tech support job because at least fifteen customers wanted to sue him for rudeness (Matt had forgotten how damn lawsuit-happy everybody was back home). He wasn't too broken up, though, because he knew of a few less legal ways to get money, and he had just scored a new girlfriend to boot.

Matt had thought himself the biggest fool in creation when a whim lead him to take an origami class advertised on a flyer in the street. He'd trudged up the stairs of a nearby apartment building to the residence of a tiny Japanese woman, who brought him tea, cookies, and sheets of square paper in a room that smelled like rotting hydrangeas. She made him put out his cigarette in the sink.

He was the only person who showed.

Halfway out the door and sealing a silent vow never to return, Matt almost ploughed into a skinny redhead who was carrying her groceries to the seventh floor. He took one of her bags and received an extended hand in return. "I'm Sandy," she said, with a Colgate smile.

Matt smiled too as he headed back home, because they'd exchanged tongues as well as numbers and he had a soaring feeling that he'd be getting lucky tonight.

"My birthday's today," he'd told her, while the sun slanted past the potted plant in her window and into her coffee mug.

"Really…" she'd replied, with a cool sip and a raised eyebrow and a question: "How old?

"Twenty-four," Matt lied, to match the listed age on his ID. Sandy laughed because she thought she had a year on him, but Matt smirked back at her because he knew she really had six. He taught her how to fold a paper crane, and watched her breasts squish against each other as she moved her arms.

Past the falsehoods and misunderstandings, Matt felt like his life was finally coming together, after nineteen years of broken stitches and dried up glue along the cracks.

Two weeks later, Sandy bought him a box of chocolates, and Matt, who had forgotten Valentine's Day altogether, decided to dump her without knowing why.

He did keep the chocolate, though.

---

Matt wasn't unusually talented at feigning sleep, but he got away with it where few others could; Mello didn't waste his acute observational skills on petty criminals. He never looked too closely when it came to Matt, and he tried not to care too much.

Matt knew this from the countless nights he'd spent lying awake with his eyes closed, waiting for the moment when Mello would drift off on top of a ream of fresh printouts. Matt could sit up then, watch Mello's hair shudder in the breeze of his exhales, watch his bare white hands unclench and go limp, fingers splaying over the tabletop like petals on a pair of late-blooming flowers.

Until his next shower, Mello would carry the mirror-imprints of five-digit numbers slanted across his right cheek. When Mello saw his own reflection, Kira stared back at him, but the only things Matt could see on his face were exhaustion and a touch of crazy.

They were bound together by a chain of commands and silences. They spoke to each other in the muted beeps of a video game, tapping computer keys, grunts and breaths, and even in bed their gasps were muffled against tense shoulders. Matt brought up his birthday more to fill the empty air than anything else, sprawled across Mello's stomach because the only way to keep him still was to pin him down.

"It'll be here in a few weeks," he said. "The big two-oh."

Mello hummed deep in his chest, a near-silent "and?" that Matt wouldn't have noticed without feeling its vibrations on his skin.

"You gonna get me anything?" he asked, feeling recklessly childish as he pushed his skewed goggles to the top of his head and grinned into Mello's eyes.

Mello popped a piece of chocolate between his teeth. "Sure," he mumbled around it, unthinking, noncommittal, with his lids at half mast and a hand curling against Matt's scalp.

---

Mello didn't wait for January to freeze itself out. The sky was already grey over Japan, and multi-tiered buildings stood, imposing and dark, along the streets. Mello got Matt early birthday presents while their breath still crystallized in the air.

Mello broke their silence with the sound of gunfire. Mello got him lead and concrete. Mello made him red flowers that would bloom over his chest without water or stems to drink it.

Mello folded him up and wrapped him in a tidy, nameless package to lay at Kira's feet.

Happy birthday, with love.


End file.
